Jennifer Saunders, star of the BBC's Absolutely Fabulous, says it is harder
for women to succeed in television than it was 20 years ago.

Her revival of Absolutely Fabulous is the centrepiece of the BBC’s Christmas Day schedules, but Jennifer Saunders claims that women have a harder time succeeeding in television now than when she began her career 20 years ago.

“I don’t think things have moved on for women much in TV,” she says. “It’s a bit of a boys’ club, and if you’re a boy you can do less and get further. I still feel that.”

Saunders, 53, adds: “I felt like we were all in this together. It was a very different executive culture then in television. It was the end of the old guard, who were kind of, 'You seem jolly good, let’s give you a few series. Off you go!’, and the beginning of an era where they just wanted to get great television up and running.

"Now, I think that’s gone. It’s just full of executive decisions and interference.”

After the Rev George Pitcher, the former mouthpiece of Dr Rowan Williams, left his job in the wake of a regrettable joke about his boss’s amorous exploits, the Archbishop of Canterbury is taking no chances with his successor.

Mandrake can disclose that Dr Williams has appointed Kay Brock, formerly the chief of staff to Ian Luder, when he was the lord mayor of the City of London, as his new secretary for public affairs.

Luder, paying tribute to the “sterling” work that Brock had done during her five years at Mansion House, said there were few pairs of hands safer than hers.

The wife of the journalist George Brock has a dry sense of humour, but she chooses her words with care. In her leaving speech, for instance, she quipped: “This recession is the immaculate recession. It came as a complete surprise and no one is claiming parentage.”

In June, Mandrake reported how Pitcher, a charismatic and affable figure, had been somewhat more ribald in his comments about a contretemps between Dr Williams and Cristina Odone, the former editor of The Catholic Herald, at a literary function. “He took her roughly over the canapés, but he’s always doing that,” Pitcher had remarked.

Odone had seen the joke, but factions within Lambeth Palace who had been opposed from the outset to Pitcher – he had been credited with making Dr Williams substantially more accessible – saw it as an opportunity to rid themselves of a priest that they regarded as a little too turbulent.